 That we're going to get started. Okay. All right. So, welcome everyone to our first spring conference for women in IR 2022. This is our gender and economics panel. Economic theory has significantly influenced global policy throughout history since Adam Smith helped begin what is known as the field of modern economics. However, the important and diverse role women play in economics have historically gone largely unnoticed. The gendered effects of economics, how the economy specifically affects women and intersectional research in the field have all been neglected. However, in the past decades, the emergence of feminist economics and push for greater attention on the effects of gender in economics has redefined the world of economics. Today we are joined by three amazing economists to discuss gender and economics. Joyce Jacobson, Trusilla Barker and Julie Nelson. Joyce Jacobson is the Andrews professor of economics at Wesleyan University and is currently the first woman president of Hobart and William Smith colleges in Geneva, New York. Her research focuses on the economics of gender, including patterns of workforce sex segregation, migration and the effects of interrupted work experience on women's earnings and advancement. Her publications include advanced introduction to feminist economics, the economics of gender and labor markets and employment relationships. She has been a strong leader in the field in 2021 she was awarded the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award for furthering the status of women in the economics profession. Trusilla Barker is a professor in the Department of anthropology and the women's and gender studies program, self identified as a Marxist feminist economics. Her research has followed the nature of labor, the importance of gender and intersectionality in economics, and the role of debt as cause of inequality on both individual and institutional levels. Her work can be found in numerous publications including liberating economics of feminist respective on families work and globalization and feminist economics critical concepts. Julie Nelson is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and as a senior research fellow here at Tufts University. Nelson has also previously held a position in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as a research economics. And Nelson's research interests include feminist economics, ethics and economics and the empirical study of individual and household behavior. She's the author of economics for humans and has recently published a paper called economics and community knowledge making. To begin, we wanted to just start off with the first question of what is feminist economics in your words. What's the try that one first. All right, let me try to do that. I wrote a book about a year ago called advanced introduction to feminist economics. And the idea was to write a short book that would really try to introduce feminist economics to a wider group of people. I think sometimes often in subgroups and economics you end up kind of talking to each other. And I tried to write it so that, for instance, a student who'd had just an intro course in economics could pick it up and read it. At the beginning I give a short answer of what it is and then the rest of the book gives the longer version. So I say that feminist economics calls for inclusive inquiry in terms of both topics studied and who studies them. It turns a critical and gender aware I on the field of economics, as well as on how real world economies function. It attends to understudy topics, often those considered feminine topics such as how households operate internally. Here's how standard economics is not truly objective, showing how standard economic models and methods may be biased towards masculine focused outcomes. It emphasizes human and systems interconnectivity, rather than independence and reminds us that economics is about both efficiency and equity, where equity and the distributional effects of economic policies are often less emphasized by economists than their efficiency. So the big question is the traditional divide between positive, what is, and normative what should be an economics without foregoing objectivity feminist critiques of the economics project serve a large part to re humanize economics as a field, and remind us that answers if there are two questions that have become devoid of meaning are not really answers at all. So that's my definition in the short answer of feminist economics. That's with an even shorter answer. I co-edited a book in 1993 about feminist economics and some years later did a survey of some economics departments and for the survey we had to define it so I just looked up what we defined it as. We defined it as including both work concerning women's and men's roles in the economy. That has a liberatory bent. So it's not just all work on gender. It's critical work concerning possible biases in the focus and methodology of the discipline. So that's our one sentence definition and still like one sentence definition. I'll go third. I agree with what my colleagues have already said. In addition, I would say that feminist economics from a Marxist perspective puts at the front and center. That is the concept of social reproduction. That is to say how our workers and other people reproduced for participation in the capitalist workforce. And so for me, that is my starting point. The latest book, Liberating Economics, second edition. That's very important. It's really different than the first edition. It's basically almost a brand new book. It includes the magnificent Suzanne Bergeron, who she and I did the second edition together. Susan Finer, our other co-author, she has retired now and just sort of didn't really want to do that kind of work. But she's still a co-author and there's still a lot of the work from the first book there. So her name is still on the title. But at any rate, the subtitle says that all families work in globalization. So in addition to social reproduction, I think feminist economics needs to take a global and intersectional approach. That is to say it has to consider both gender and race and geography and nationality as categories of analysis, rather than as simple objects to be taken as given and plugged in as new dependent variables. So that's my definition. Thank you so much. So you guys all mentioned in some form, unpaid labor or like as you said social reproduction. Could one of you start with answering the question, in what ways do you think women shape the economy that is not generally acknowledged? Sure, I'll begin that one. Women shape the economy because it is women who undertake the vast amount of social reproduction, which as my colleagues know and we all know is both paid and unpaid. So it has market aspects and non-market aspects. Absolutely necessary to the running of a capitalist economy and keeping it low paid or unpaid in the case of housewives is a boon for capitalists. It keeps their production costs low. One more thing about that. And this is not my idea. This is in the social reproduction literature. There's a real contradiction between the capitalist desire for profits and the capitalist need for social reproduction. Those two things are constantly in contradiction to one another. It's kind of like the snake eating its tail. It's been very taken by an economist Nancy Folbrae's work and in particular her work and really fleshing out the term more of caring labor. And I think similar to what Drew is saying that women do the vast majority of caring labor, which includes social reproduction but also many forms of not just reproduction but caring for those who need care whether they're disabled persons, older young persons and caring labor has particular drawbacks to those doing it as Nancy has spelled out in terms of how you can be kind of captured by those relationships. And in some sense exploited by the very ties of the heart that tie you to the people for who you are performing that labor. That labor then is often done for no money, but also often done for low amounts of money as well partly because people are reluctant to turn away from that labor, because it is so necessary and because of those emotional ties. I'll add a third spin on that, which is, you know, feminist economists have looked a lot at the standard models of economic behavior in orthodox economics. That's how I was trained straight sort of neoclassical and realize that it's not a very good description of women but it's also not a very good description of men. It's an autonomous self interested being people actually grow up in families, they get sick they get old. A lot of the burden of that work. As we mentioned, falls on women. However, I just want to speak up sort of in opposition to naive way that sometimes people will take this, which is that there is a masculine economy that's all about self interest and getting ahead and profit, and kind of a feminine economy that's all about care. The problem if you think that way is that you let the regular economy go on discriminating against women and destroying the climate and doing all of the other harm it does. And you tend to starve the care economy. The care economy needs resources. The care economy has been treated as though women have nothing else to do they're just naturally caring just volunteer to bring up kids and everything else. But I think fathers also love their kids I think any human being should be interested in survival of future generations. So I argue that we need more resources going to the caring economy, or both men and women should participate. And we need more care in the so called regular economy, we're both men and women participate. Thank you so much, Professor Nelson you mentioned the care economy, could you go into further detail of how the care economy has shifted from perhaps in the, like in the class in the 20th century to the 21st century. I had the article I co wrote with Nancy full brain in front of me. I could actually give you statistics. We did a piece that appeared in Journal of Economic Perspectives some some time ago that looked at a couple things one was the shift of shift of women into the labor force. That meant a rise of more marketed childcare services and the rest of this kind of thing, and also shifts within the paid economy in advanced industrial economies. And we showed that in fact the sort of the the picture of the worker, say around 1900 was a man working in a factory. When we look at the worker now it's somebody working in a hospital, or a school or another service sector, the service sector has grown greatly, and those traditional, you know, sort of masculine blue collar work areas have have shrunk. And with much hardship involved I'm not saying this, this is all a good thing but there has been a big shift in, and of course as as populations age it gets even more extreme. Japan is especially facing this, but also the US. You know people do break down over time and somebody needs to take care of them as they age. Mr. Brecker, do you have something to add just like to add to that the other thing that has changed over the years, probably starting in the mid 1970s is the offshoring of manufacturing from the global north to the global south. And in the global south, the labor force that produces the stuff that we use our iPhones are toys. Basically, our closing is about 80% women, you know it varies from place to place and that's a not a rigorous figure but it's it's pretty widely agreed that it that the factory worker of today is a woman, not a man. And that's, I think as we go through today, I want to keep that that global south global north distinction, someone in my mind, because the labor that's done in the global south, making those inexpensive toys that inexpensive clothing, relatively inexpensive depending on what what your income level is, as has been one of the things that has helped women in the first world in the United States and Europe to enter the labor force, both in the service economy as Julie, as said, and she's absolutely right in terms of the United States. And also the managerial economy that you know if you look at how you know, look at the staff of your own college colleges it's who are who are the people that are doing all that clerical work it's overwhelmingly women. Thank you so much. Professor Jacobson do you have anything to add before I go to the next question. I think they've they've spelled that one out pretty thoroughly. Speaking of the global south. What additional obstacles to women of color face in our economy today. None of us are specialists in that although I believe all of us have worked on it at at some point another there are some other people that could speak much more knowledgeably. Certainly is the case of, you know that these things are intersectional not just just additive that a lot like a lot of my writing for example has concentrated on Western industrial societies and the way that stereotypes of women like middle class women, you know, centrally located in those are considered to be centrally located in those societies are thought of and the way that those stereotypes get reinforced. But of course a lot of those stereotypes never did fit black women recent immigrant women, other other groups, and there are, you know compounding disadvantages in a lot of this and I don't have, you know statistics and everything in again because I wasn't prepared for this question, but there certainly are issues. One thing that's I've always been fascinated with is the incredible degree of gender segregation and our economy, and it has this intersectional aspect on the gender segregation as well. In terms of thinking where we are accustomed to see women of various racial and ethnic groups as well as men various racial ethnic groups and how much that can be very binding on people. I've always just been so interested to see and it can vary by culture of course like drew was saying, you know, clerical work in some cultures is more of a woman's job and other cultures like Pakistan is actually more of a men's job. And so it relates partly to how much you can participate in the labor market as a whole, but in a country like ours where there are many different groups including even very specific ethnic groups and areas is just always fascinating to look at the degree of segregation. For instance, I think if you look at New York there's a stereotype that nail salons are run by Asian women often actually by Korean women. And so you get these narrow function areas that are considered appropriate for women, including the intersectional aspect of women of a particular race or ethnicity. And again, as was emphasized earlier these are very binding on men as well. So there are very specific categories and areas you see men and that also relate to race and ethnicity. And until you kind of look around and see it you just sort of take it for granted, but it can be very binding and when people are in fields that they're not normally in that can vary be very disjointing for other people to see them there which I think is good it's good to shake them up and make them start not associating particular occupations or industries with particular types of people. But there is just so much of that going on and, of course, it is clearer that women of color and men of color often are in jobs that are also less economically advantaged. I think people of color face a even higher degree of occupational segregation. I know in my city Columbia, South Carolina, we have a very, very, very large black population, and a fairly large middle class, you know group of middle class professional women. I know many of them because we have a party every year for Anita Hill, called the I believe Anita Hill party, and it's the one time I get to mix with professional black women and professional white women it started out as a group of women and others. And anyway, so there, there is a, there is a lot of that but on the other hand, when I look at and I know this is a very small personal anecdote but I still think it's good evidence. When I look at my own university, and I look at the janitorial staff. It is mainly people of color is mainly African Americans. And when I look at the clerical staff, it is a little more mixed but I just off the top of my head estimate I'd say probably about a quarter of the clerical staff here are women of color and three quarters are white. And so occupational segregation continues to rear its ugly head because white privilege and the denial of white privilege. And we're seeing it with all the rules now that you can't teach critical race theory in school well critical race theory has never been taught in elementary schools or high schools and critical race theory is taught in law schools and it's a long noble history and the people that talk about it have no idea, but the underlying messages don't make white people uncomfortable. Don't talk about anything that makes white people uncomfortable. And I find that really distressing. Thank you so much. Speaking of your own personal experiences. Could you each talk about what drove you to study economics. I'll start to two reasons. I wanted to know why people some people were rich and some people were poor. I was very interested in the problem of inequality, which I didn't have a name for in those days. That was one one reason. The other reason was much more pragmatic. I wanted a job, and I wanted to be a professor, and I was fairly certain if I got a PhD in economics, I could get a job, and I could be a professor. And then I once I had a job and had tenure, I could hammer out my career however I wanted. And so that's why I did it. I didn't know what economics was, by the way, really shocked my first year in graduate school is like, oh no. The world is all this math. I hate math. Yeah, I, my stories, similar to Drew's in the sense that I wanted to know why some people were rich and some people were poor, and preferably do something about it. The reason is that I liked math and I was good at it, but I didn't want to be locked away just doing math or just doing computer science I also wanted to do something that had more with people. And I took my first economics class not voluntarily but because my advisor kind of marched me over the table and signed me up. I had assumed that that economics was all about business and business was all about self interest, which is what we're taught and which I have come to question quite a lot. But my undergraduate education was geared towards ideas of service. So in my undergraduate education, I did see some idea of how economics could be used. And then like drew I got to graduate school and got hit with a wall of mathematics problem sheets and a huge lack of critical thinking. But like drew I barreled through figuring that nobody would. By that time I realized economics needed a feminist critique. And I also realized no one would listen to me unless I got the credentials. So I did get the PhD in economics I did publish in econometrica as my first publication which was nice, you know, dotted all of those across those teas and dotted those eyes so that then I could talk about what I really wanted to talk about. Well, similar to both drew and Julie I was also very interested in inequality and also public service I thought I would eventually become a work for the federal government and health and human services or something. And also was good at math but knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So economics is a good field I think for people who are comfortable with mathematics but don't want it to be the only thing they're doing. And I had not had any in high school I just signed up for the big intro econ class, when I got to college and I love the fact that it was kind of about everything. It didn't force you to, to narrow down to one area because you can use economic analysis to study so many things. And I love the fact it was about everything and didn't require you to settle in on one and, and then discovered really that you could study areas that I was interested in like the why do women and men make different amounts of money and work, more or less in the world. And it was moving into areas that have been considered more sociological, or even anthropological, and that that was something that you could study also which made it even broader. So just have always enjoyed the breadth of the analytical structure and how you can think about the world around you. I mentioned a form of autonomy, where, whether that be through job or research and wanting to know what inequality was or like why it existed for your reasons for why you started studying economics do you have any insight now, decades into your careers about what, like why inequality exists and also, like, yeah. It's a really big issue. I mean there are a number of reasons there are ways to model it there are unfortunately some theories that seem sort of like impossibility theorems on ever being able to eradicate it. I sort of like Julie and drew I think I thought when I got to graduate school after undergrad that they would explain how it all worked, and how you could solve problems and instead graduate school tends to be a whole bunch of theory theorems on why you actually can't do what you want to do and you can't solve it, and you can't fully understand people's preferences, and you can't make one person better off without making other people worse off in general. So it makes it all much more difficult. That said, I mean I think there have been many points of progress so it can be a little depressing, sometimes to study economics of gender because women are still unequal relative to men, but I do think things have gotten better. I think in some countries work better than others countries that tend to have more social support structures and pull up the bottom and take away more from the top tend to be better for women. So there are things we know from that, but there are tradeoffs involved in that like everything else, including different levels of unemployment. So I think we know more about it, and we know how we could reduce it but we're not always willing to take the steps to actually do the things that would reduce it. So I'll go next I'll probably be in that sort of in the middle between Joyce and Drew on this one where I were often find myself. Our standard economic analysis tends to look at these as mainly issues of human capital and development investment taxation. We tend to miss capital meaning education and training and tends to miss a lot of the power aspects. Joyce herself does not miss them, but our profession as a whole tends to concentrate on things that are sort of easily explainable with data and miss things like systematic sexism and racism. And then, if you talk about inequality in a larger global sense, we tend to really miss the issues of international power. I was doing some work on climate change and there's, there's a little thing that looks technical something called technical called the Gishi weights to prevent capital flows between countries. What it means is we want the rich countries to stay rich and the poor countries to stay poor through any adjustments to climate. We're going to make sure that the this global balance doesn't shift. So there are huge issues of systematic power and abusive power that standard analysis simply doesn't get to. On the other hand, I think that they're the part of this issue that I've taken on to work myself is that I find a lot of people who I think of as good hearted and wanting to do something about this on buying into a lot of the myths that prevent them seeing opportunities. For example, this myth that care work doesn't need any resources, or this myth that business and management can be only about profit and not about people. Businesses are actually made up of people. They're actually part of society. The economy is not something off in some satellite sphere somewhere that is not subject to social and ethical rules. So that that's been my little little corner that I've been tugging at on a vast and complicated issue. I have well I for the past 15 years I've been in an anthropology department and it's a complicated story I came as a director and the economics department was like no way. She's not a real economist we're not going to give her tenure and the women's and gender studies program. It is a program not a department so they weren't a 10 year granting unit at any rate anthropology said sure we'd like to have her because we like her global focus and her work on inequality. So, but I have over the 15 years become quite influenced by economic anthropology. And in particular the work of people like David Graber the late David Graber, and whose death I mourn so much I mean I read his book debt. And it changed my entire research trajectory. But one of the points he makes in this book is again as Julie said common common sense notions and he begins the book with an anecdote of a conversation he had at a party in London was a woman, very well intentioned woman. And she looked at him and she said, but surely one must pay one's debts. And that was the spark for him to write that book, because as he pointed out in actuality if you think of who owes what to whom. The global sales does not owe us anything. We owe the global sales, an enormous debt, because without those global sales resources, the industrial revolution would never have happened without sugar from the Caribbean cotton from the United States. Just named to two most prominent things there are many others, but oh sorry. But I think I think those kind of common sense notions particularly around debt. Surely one has to pay one's debts. Well no actually not always. And, and forcing the global south to paying their debts is one of the things that has kept them impoverished all these years, and will also be a huge driver of anti climate change, because it inhibits their ability to undertake what they need to take on to stop climate change. So I, I say debt is one of those huge factors and common sense notions about it. Thank you. To continue that conversation. Could any of you explain what is the difference between gender equity, gender equality and women's empowerment in regards to the economy. I can start on this one because I actually saw your questions and thought about it a little bit. First of all the difference between gender equity and gender equality that's pretty simple gender, gender equality means you give each group, say women and men, the same number of resources, the same rules, the same wages, etc. are available to both of these groups. However, the structural impediments to women's participation in the labor force and things like that are not equal. And so if you have gender equality, but you don't have any changes in those structural things like protection for reproductive rights and the right to abortion, and that sort of thing, then it doesn't make any difference. And you might have all seen that meme where you have two kids picking apples off a tree, and they both have the same size ladders, but one of them is much shorter. So that's equality. Equity would give the person picking the short person a taller ladder. And so equity is a more complicated subject and needs to go further than equality. And then finally with regards to women's empowerment. It is a concept I do not use. To me it is smacks of neoliberalism. And it says well we're going to give you the tools to make so you can better yourself. And I just, I don't like that neoliberal. I, I don't think it has any meaning and I don't like it. I think they're really interesting concrete versions of this that we think about all the time and I appreciate Drew's distinction and and I'm fine with also not trying to figure out what women's empowerment should be in this. I mean a great example I think that has come up in my career is parental leaves versus mother's leaves or maternal leaves. And I think when I first started in the Academy, we didn't have any leave at all my first job there was no parental leave of any type so we just had to cover our own classes or hope we had a child during the summer, which luckily my first one right after exams ended so I could take off the summer and then she was old enough to go to daycare because the school didn't provide any leave and my colleague who had her daughter during October had to hire someone to cover her class for the rest of the term. Then the next school I went to there was parental leave, and it was the same whether or not you're a man or a woman. And that was good because I did have a baby in October that year. We did let us choose whether we wanted to have one class and not lose any pay or no classes and lose some pay. And since I was new on my job, I chose the option of one class without losing pay, which meant I did have to find someone to watch my child, three days a week after I had him. And then about halfway through my time at that job at Westland. There was a movement among the younger faculty to switch to a different leaf structure where women would get longer leave than men. And the argument was that that was the equitable structure while the early structure was equal but not equitable, though perversely that it caused a sort of a, I think a problem in terms of thinking about when women got credit, because they would still take it as a leave and get credit towards their sabbaticals. So often when you're trying to set up either an equal session or an equitable system, there can be these weird other consequences that actually can work them. But for me that was a very graphic example of the shift in how people were thinking about how to handle the quality and equity and how it affected these leave structures in academia and other other areas as well. I don't really have anything to add to what my colleagues have said. Thank you. And that's a really interesting example of how you've experienced different versions of leave throughout your career, like in such a short period of time from no equality to equality to equity. Another question we have is how does economic gender inequality defer based on culture and location. I think we talked a little bit about it in the beginning but if we could expand on that, that'd be great. Could you repeat the question. Yeah, of course. So, how does economic gender inequality defer based on culture and location so more of the intersectionality part are like further from just being in America as a white woman. Well, we have. There are people who do a lot of the international comparisons and if you look at industrialized countries, you know Scandinavia is the big outlier in creating, you know, long parental leaves, use it or lose it leaves for male parents. So there's a great attitude towards taking leave. I remember being in Norway and somebody, a man referred to his female colleague is having worked there for 12 years. She'd actually been on leave for something like six of those years having her kids, but she's still regarded as having 12 years there. We have some some downsides the occupational segregation in places like Sweden and Norway can actually be more than in the US that is women are very well represented in things like governments and education and not very well represented at all in things like manufacturing. And then you get, you know, countries in which there may be say equality in terms of access to parental leave but it only covers a very small part of the workforce that is formal. You know, or there may be anti discrimination laws, but they only cover certain kinds of waged work and, you know, most of the most women and men work in less formal sorts of employment. So then you get, you know, very different patterns coming out. I mean there really is a real extreme here country by country and even within a region. You get these variations. I mean, I think one thing is that class differences matter a lot. And so in some countries that are sort of lower income countries you could still have a phenomenon where there are some very highly educated women who participate very fully. And so they tend to be the upper upper class women actually could be relatively equal to men and often are involved in government etc. But then there's a big difference. So when you get down to the lower income sector in terms of where you see women and men and the different levels of education. So I think class is another way we hadn't talked about as much earlier and thinking about the way these very segregation aspects cut across. And so being a high income woman versus a low income woman could be a very different experience I would say probably more so in other countries more than in the US, where women tend to work more in all the, all the class levels in the US more than in some Yeah, and I think when we think about cultural differences. We have to be really careful about the assumptions we make. And for example one kind of common sense assumption is that women in Islamic countries are more oppressed than women in Western countries, and that the job is a symbol of only a symbol of oppression. Now I don't want to get into a debate about the hijab because that's that's going way far away from economics and. But nevertheless, when you kind of look at at the Islamic countries and women's participation in the labor force, you often get much different results. And one of the things, one of the results is there's a lot more homework in low income Islamic countries that is to say work that is done for profit to sell, but it's done in the home. And so it is, it is consistent with their gender laws and their gender customs, and that sort of thing. Or when you look at countries like Egypt. That's a very interesting example particularly with regards to the job, because one of the reasons as that has been emphasized that women in Egypt took up the hijab with such a rigor and vigor and enthusiasm. Not all of them but some of them was they, if they were in the lower classes in the working classes, they had to go to work in the factories, Egypt had to participate in the international economy in this way. And that meant well being outside the home, giving up that status of being in the home, etc, etc. And so taking up the hijab was a sign of no I am not giving up my status as a woman I am protecting it with the hijab I'm a respectable woman. I am still a respectable Muslim woman. You also find this in Indonesia. So I think as Western feminists, and Western feminists, and all the disciplines that have international connections. I think we need to really look at cultures very carefully, and try to be self reflective as to what our assumptions are, and particularly around Islam, but but in other cultures as well. Thank you. I think also we're going to do two more questions then head to the Q&A section. The first question is, how has the pandemic affected the economy in regards to women. I think it's been very hard on women, partly because of the caring aspect, and the fact that the school system in many places basically broke down. Sometimes people didn't want to send their children into schools and as they didn't have the option. So daycare has also been harder to get during the pandemic many daycares closed down. And so many women have not returned to the labor force at this point. So it's given that they have often had primary requirement for taking care of children. It has affected them a lot and set us back years in my view, where the labor force participation rate had been rising for women, and now it has has dropped back down. It's been very, very difficult also obviously many professions that women are in like nursing, other sort of customer facing professions have been hit hard. And so it's been a very challenging period. It's not to say it hasn't been challenging for men as well, but there are specific aspects related to household structure that have made it very difficult for women. Do you want to go Julie. I don't, I don't have a lot to add I just know that I was particularly struck by some statistics. It was during the first year of the pandemic that when September came and schools got started again huge drop in in women's employment and women's labor force for taste. It was something like you know 70 or 80% of the people who left their jobs, you know right as school started were women. Okay, I agree with what both of my colleagues have said in addition I would say that. Even the, the supports that we had before the pandemic, particularly with the transnational labor, the transnational market for care labor nursing childcare etc. So I would go down because we could no longer travel from country to country. And so, all of a sudden you had middle class women and upper middle class women who they were the ones responsible for these children and I have obviously I'm oil past my child bearing years now but I have several friends who have children and it was a real and even that all of them that I know a very caring and attentive husbands, but nevertheless the reality is the burden fell on them to try to keep their career together and this was academia so it was a lot easier. It wasn't like being a bank manager or something. But, but the stress that it put on women was just astonishing, no matter which class you were in. And part of this, the stress because the, the structures of, of childcare, all of a sudden fell apart. Closed international travel was closed daycare centers were closed. I mean it shoved everything back into the private familial unit and therefore on the burden, I mean on the shoulders of women in that unit. If you look at other indicators of coven, not just gender indicators I was looking at the UN sustainable development goals recently for class I'm teaching. And oh my gosh they on goals that were, you know had rising indicators now are all going negative and it's all because of coven so it had a devastating impact on women. Yeah, I had personally not even heard of the term care economics or like a care economy until this past year in college so thank you for illustrating the effects of the pandemic on, especially the care economy. And then our final question is more of a personal one but what difficulties have you all faced as women in economics. And do you think that the field has become more inclusive. I'll let the other two go because they've had more conventional economics careers than I have. Yeah, I had. As I said I didn't think anybody would believe me unless I had all the economics credentials. It turns out some people don't accept feminist economists even when they do have all the academic credentials, so I had tenure at University California Davis I came to another eminent Boston area institution Brandeis University as an associate professor on tenured. And even though it was a much lower ranking school ended up being denied tenure there. I got a probable cause finding from Massachusetts Commission on discrimination. But there was, I think when they hired me they thought I did kind of an add women and stir sort of thing using can, you know, main mainstream work to look at women's issues. And I did some of that but I also did some real critique of why we think that math is so much important that important than words self interest so much more important than interdependence, etc. And they could not abide that. I did eventually land a UMass Boston, which was a wonderful place in the sense that you could not tell the students and the faculty from the food service workers. But it was not, you know, clearly not as prestigious as some of the other places I had been, but I have no regrets. In my career I also actually that the year after I, when I left Brandeis I actually went to UMass Boston for a year and then to Harvard for a year on a fellowship, and also done some teaching there so it's been a very mixed career, but I have no regrets about about choosing it. It's funny because I think both Julie and I recently were asked to write essays for a book about second wave feminists in the social sciences so it was the first time I'd really sat down and kind of gone back over and thought about what happened when and a lot of when I came along it was right when things were opening up more for women. When I started in college it was the first year that admissions had been gender blind for instance at the college. So I feel like I've had a little easier path, but just coming along a little later. But I think the question about inclusivity is interesting. I think in some ways the field is less inclusive frankly. I feel like it's gotten a little more, even though we have an area of feminist economics now it's almost like, I don't want to say it's a ghetto, but there's a little bit of pigeonholing of people into areas that bothers me. And I actually worry that it's less inclusive because of that. I agree with what both of my colleagues have just said and but I want to add that I actually think I benefited from being a woman when I applied to graduate school I was not an econ major as an undergraduate I was a philosophy major. And that's really what I wanted to do is philosophy. As I said I wanted a job, and I didn't think I was going to be able to get a job in philosophy that was the beginning of the real tightening of careers and humanities in general, and the changes in the university. But at that time, I think economics departments wanted particularly American women to diversify their student body and ultimately their faculty. It was partly a racist move. They didn't want they, they were being harder on applicants from Asia, who had mathematical skills to beat the band. But they, they really wanted to sort of change that face of economics. And so they accepted me as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana with a, you know, a fairly nice package. And then I was able to teach as an instructor at Illinois State. And so it really helped me then. The only time it really hurt me was when I went from Holland's University, a small women's liberal arts college in Virginia to the University of South Carolina to be the director of women's studies. It hurt me then because the economics department, they wouldn't even, I had just published the first edition of liberating. I had gotten really good reviews. I had a couple of good articles out one in signs, one in frontiers, etc. They wouldn't even look at that stuff they just said that's not economics, we won't have anything to do with her. And that's when I went into anthropology. Now, ultimately, that was a gift to me, I have benefited so much intellectually from my affiliation with anthropology and particularly my delving into economic anthropology and my wonderful colleagues here at the university. What I've given up, however, is the title Professor of Economics, and I was a professor of economics when I went on the market. I had gotten promoted at when I was at Holland's. And so, like recently I've been working on a living wage campaign for our union here campus workers united. And I've written some stuff for them to use. And I just, it kills me that I can't write Dracae Barker Professor of Economics, because that has far more prestige than Dracae Barker Professor of anthropology, and that I do regret. Well, I don't regret it. It just makes me sad that it had to happen. I wouldn't change it. I mean, I would, I would make the same decision again and a heartbeat, it was a good decision. But I just feel that I really lost something when I could no longer say I was a professor of economics. And I begged the Dean couldn't we make an exception for me or something. And she said absolutely not true. So telling that so telling also that you're saying that Professor of Anthropology is not as high status as Professor of Economics, and what that does about academia. I mean it's just not and I, I, I have volunteered to work on campaigns political campaigns here and stuff. And I do, but I know that I, that I would have much more recognition and respect if I were a professor of economics. That's just, that's just the facts of the world. Anthropology. What is that about. No one even knows what anthropology is usually. Even though it's a really wonderful social science. Thank you so much for all of your insights on both the field and your personal experiences. We don't have time for a very long Q&A, but I do have two questions. Any of you guys feel as though you want to answer, you don't have to all answer. The first question is based on your experience in research. Is there any way to undo sex segregation in the US and abroad in your personal opinion. What's going to happen in my my lifetime. I think there are very deep forces I talk about a lot of my first book and economics of gender. It often reappears and other forms. So it seems to be a very fundamental aspect of human organization I just don't know if we can actually ever eradicate it. I think that the choices right about that. On the other hand, I also have to say that I have seen changes in my lifetime. I remember an exchange when I was an undergraduate majoring in economics with a middle aged woman who asked me what I was in and I said economics and she said, oh home economics how nice, you know, and, and this was this was pretty standard at the time. I also remember hearing when I was first studying gender and economics this was in the 1970s that women were not in fields like law or business simply because they weren't interested or were capable. Funny how anti discrimination law suddenly all of these women become interested and capable who were not, you know, there before. So there have been, you know, very large inroads in some areas. In some cases it's actually tipped now a pharmacy. Being a pharmacist is now a female dominant has gone from male dominated female dominated. So in, in a sense segregation in the other direction. But yeah, it's a there's, you know, you can do a long treatise on this there's rules, you know, there's rules for legislation there's rules for role modeling there's. You know, there's, sorry roles for all of those things in creating this kind of change, but it's an uphill battle people have are very territorial and have a lot of their identity tied up with their work and identities and particularly like these sorts of changes. I agree with both of you and I just want to add what the great late Barbara Barbara Bergman said which is that sex segregation benefits men and they don't want to give up that benefit. They don't want they don't want their, their professions to become feminized. They're perfectly happy with things the way they are, for the most part. And I think she was right. I thought she was right then and I think she's right today. And then the last question that we have time for is, how does the economy and labor markets shape households. That's a huge question that would take like another two hours. I mean I think we indicated some ways that we've indicated a lot about as you point out that households shape labor markets but labor markets clearly shape households partly because men and women make different amounts of earnings and that goes back and the power relationships within the household. They all just leave it at that small point for this, since we're running long time. I'll just point to a phrase that I really like us to teach my gender and I kind of course is coming from Joan Williams that were set up on a lot of the work structure employment structure in the US is set to be jobs with wives. And that is the jobs are assumed if somebody else taking care of the stuff at home. So you can work late so you can travel so you can, you know, you have to be 100% on the job and if you're not able to do that, you're put into some kind of slow tier slow slow road sort of thing. It doesn't need to be that way she also called young, she also calls us the problem of 13 eggs. You know if you go to the store and you want 13 eggs you've got to buy two dozen because they don't come in packs of 13. Well we have more and more workers that are more like 13 eggs than like 12 right more and more people that have, you know, elderly dependents children at home, you know, as women have come into the labor force. So why we keep structuring a lot of our jobs and structuring our public policies around the idea that people don't need, don't have these other responsibilities is is insane. And the economy has really always kind of shaped the structure of the family. I mean when we went in the United States from an agrarian economy with sort of the yeoman farmer, who had all the people be beneath him to a wage labor system that really changed the whole structure of the family as well. And these various economic changes always profoundly affect the structure of the economy, and they always will. And so I think we have to always take into account that relationship between economic structures and institutions and familial structures and institutions. You can't explain the nuclear family by itself, you have to include what were the economic conditions that led to the nuclear family, and to the breakdown of the extended family, for example, and this is very specifically about the United States. Thank you. And this is all the time that we have. But again, thank you so much for taking the time out of your days to come to speak at our panel. Great. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for the invitation. Bye. Bye bye. It's been a lot of fun you guys.